Inspect What You Expect: Leadership 101
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Tim at the Naval Academy in January of 2000 with the chapel dome in the background.
I've learned a lot about leadership during my time in the military. I've probably learned the most from the senior non-commissioned officers in Navy (Chiefs, Senior Chiefs, and Master Chiefs) and Marine Corps (Staff Sergeants, Gunnery Sergeants, etc). One of the first things I learned from them was "inspect what you expect."
Simple But Effective
It sounds so simple right? But I often forget to do this -- both at work and at home. Sometimes, I just figure that people will do what they're told. Sometimes, though, I just get too busy and forget what tasks I have delegated out.
Fire and Forget -- Doesn't Work with People
You may have heard of fire and forget weapons. Unfortunately, this doesn't work with people. People can be forgetful themselves so they may forget the tasks that you fired off to them. Email tasking is popular, but it can be the worst kind of delegating.
It Also Doesn't Work With Systems
Computers are supposed to make our lives easier, but they don't always. Sometimes they make our lives more complicated -- like this weekend for Franicia and me. We were notified by one of our good friends from Psalm 67:2 Music that she received a "403 Forbidden" error when trying to submit comments on our blog! Yikes! That's not good!
So I, Tim, spent the next 2 hours trying to figure out why our comment system was not working like it was supposed to. Long story short -- a couple of plugins were not playing well with Automatic's Jetpack. I figured this out after resetting all (at least almost all) of the permissions on the files and folders in our blog's file system, disconnected, reconnected, disabled and uninstalled then reinstalled Jetpack, installed Disqus's commenting plug-in.... Anyway, I knew that plugins can sometimes not play well together so it's best to keep all the plugins to a minimum and be very deliberate and cautious when installing plugins.
I know now that I need to be checking out commenting system as well as the various other features of our website periodically and inspect what I expect!